After lunch – despite his friends’ unanimous advice – Alger wrote a telegram to HUAC demanding the opportunity to meet his accuser and deny the charges under oath.
He told them he had Endowment business in Washington and proposed that he testify that morning. HUAC had never taken on a “friendly” witness of his stature before; he was pushing them into dangerous territory, and he had no doubt that he “would be able to show them promptly that they had been misled.” From what he knew of them and of himself he could thrash the lot of them into a public apology with one hand tied behind his back. A public collapse in front of somebody like him just might spell an end to the Committee’s reign of terror.
It probably never occurred to him that they might harm him.
That’s one of the things about legal cases though. You can’t anticipate what they’re going to toss in your face – it’s one reason they make such good thrillers – and an element inserted itself into Alger’s case that nobody could have anticipated. The makeup of the Committee was constantly changing. Alger’s response to HUAC provoked the special interest of one of its newer members, an obscure young representative from California, first elected to Congress only the year before.
His name was Richard Milhous Nixon.